


Immunosuppression

by asocialconstruct



Series: terrible htp minifills [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Horror, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, HYDRA Trash Party, Torture, early WS Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:54:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4311297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asocialconstruct/pseuds/asocialconstruct
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find him like that, later, the skin around the metal swollen and raw. He bites the first one to haul him up, getting a mouthful of his own blood and bitter yellow pus from where the bastard’s hand slid across the mess of his shoulder, and he spits it back into the face of the next one even though he can’t quite stand to get away from them. There’s yelling, and then there’s ringing, and then there’s nothing, his head cracked against the concrete floor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Immunosuppression

He swims up into the itching, burning rawness of it first, like his left hand has been stuck in a bucket of hot sand. It drags like a lead glove so that he can’t push himself sitting at first, dragging it beside him and scooting on his ass like a car-mangled dog so that he can put his face in the pan of cool water by the door, too desperate to look at the thing.  
  
He can’t not look at it, though, the ugly half healed mess of his shoulder, metal disappearing into skin like the head of a tick. It twitches and spasms on its own, like he’s being replaced by something with a mind of its own. The arm jerks at random, reacting to pain he can only feel after it’s happened, shooting up from the finger tips. He gouges fingers of his right hand into the join, digging it out, looking for the end of it and the beginning of him, but he can’t find it. The scarring reaches down his back as far as he can reach, the harsh sharpness of it just discernible under skin, and maybe that’s all he is now, skin stretched over a heavy metal carcass, brain dying in a hollow body.  
  
The body still bleeds, they haven’t taken that from him yet, can’t deny him the hot searing pain of tearing skin away from the thing they’ve welded into him. He laughs hysterically at the thought, alone in the dark, imagining the red tendrils of sepsis chasing down into his heart and finally putting an end to this. It echoes off the stone walls back at him, throbbing in time to his aching head and he can’t stop, fingertips burning against traitorous skin where it meets the cold lack of sensation.  
  
They find him like that, later, the skin around the metal swollen and raw. He bites the first one to haul him up, getting a mouthful of his own blood and bitter yellow pus from where the bastard’s hand slid across the mess of his shoulder, and he spits it back into the face of the next one even though he can’t quite stand to get away from them. There’s yelling, and then there’s ringing, and then there’s nothing, his head cracked against the concrete floor.  
  
He comes to with the wet pop of his right arm wrenched out of socket, washed over by the blinding pain of it a half second later. He retches with the pain, face down on the concrete in his own bile, right arm pulled up into agony behind him and the other a useless dead anchor. Boot on his back to keep him writhing on the floor and hands yanking his arm out of joint.  
  
And then it’s like everything else in this place: he thinks he’s met the limits of what the body can bear until the next agony happens, arm yanked into the air by a chain until he’s scrambling through white blinding pain to get his feet under him, dragged down by the metal arm until that too is dragged off the floor by the wrenching, relentless pull of the chain around the right wrist.  
  
He dances on tip toes, the right arm pulled toward the ceiling and locked there, high enough he can’t get feet flat enough to support his weight, all of it pulling on the wrist and dislocated shoulder, pulled like taffy or hung up like a side of beef.  
  
The metal arm gets sensation as the right goes numb, fingertips going cold until it starts creeping down the right arm and into him, into his heart like he wishes the sepsis would do. He can barely catch sight of it if he pushes up on tip toes, unbalanced enough to wake up the wrenching pain of the right shoulder, and he can see enough of it to know he doesn’t want to see it. The right hand is going purple black, pointing at God in a rictus of sainted agony and he laughs himself blasphemously crying sick imagining the statue of his martyrdom. An anchor around his neck and his severed hand and his own flayed skin, Saint Clement and Saint Luke and Saint Bart all in one. As if it’s the work of God that reattached his hand. As if he can blaspheme any more profoundly in this hell, denied resurrection in Christ and trapped in this mangled body.  
  
The tears that drip onto his feet might as well be saints’ tears, for all the good that they do him.  
  
He curls the metal arm back against itself, digging the metal fingers into the join where metal disappears into meat, trying to dig the thumb under the plates of it, pry it up. There’s pain when they catch him at it, hot stripping pain down his back and thighs where leather tipped with metal digs in and he dances on his toes, but he keeps at it as soon as it’s done, because it’s the most proof he’s had so far that he’s real, that he’s not becoming invisible. He gets more control over the metal hand heartbeat by heartbeat, tearing himself away from it because they stay out of reach, just shadows at the far boundary of his pain blurred vision. He can’t use the metal arm against them, but he can use it against the thing they put in him, use it to tear itself out.  
  
They get a mitten over it eventually, after he’s broken the nose of one and bitten the ear off another, thrashing his weight against the pain in the dislocated shoulder until they jam something into him that crackles up his back and into the chain, waking up the black swollen right hand with lightning so that he can feel exactly how dead it is.  
  
He scrapes at the join of metal anyway, rubbing stiff wool into his collarbone with curled fingers until the the blisters he’s made burst and ooze down the metal.  
  
They put a bare table just within reach after hours, or days, or years, when he’s nothing but a mess of blood and shit and bile, dangling on the hope that the right hand will gangrene and stop his heart with rot from the inside. The table has little stacking blocks on it, and the table clatters uselessly to the floor when he tries to close the metal hand around the blocks and throw them at the shadows. There’s more pain, hot stripes familiar across his back, his throat, his face, metal barb caught in his cheek so that they have to come close enough to pull it out and he spits blood in their eyes.  
  
They suffocate him for that. There’s a muzzle, tightened across the bridge of his nose and under his jaw just where he can see the black edge of it, where the rank smell of his own bile and bloody stubble is all he’s trapped with, where the sluggish trail of blood from the gouged cheek itches its torturous way down his jaw until he’s almost mad with it. Out of everything, his world boils down to that one little indignity, insignificant wet movement on his own skin so overwhelming the tears slicking the muzzle don’t even register.  
  
The table comes back after an eon and he leaves it. It stays there and he counts the blocks, over and over. Drips blood and sweat onto them, watches the wood grain crawl and pulse. The biggest one starts to creep across the table towards him and he puts another block on it to weight it down, the third one on top of that to keep it in place.   
  
The blocks stay put and they ratchet the chain down enough far enough for him to stand on the flats of his feet with the right elbow crooked, the rush of pain and blood and feeling into the numb right arm almost orgasmic.  
  
More blocks, then, matching square pegs to square holes and round pegs to round holes he can barely see, and they ratchet the chain down far enough that he can cradle the dead right arm against his chest with his left, metal hot on the cold purpling skin of the right arm. They put a disassembled gun on the table for him to assemble and yank the chain back to the ceiling when he hurls the stock at the closest shadow, leave him dangling there for another age of the world. Whip his mangled corpse until there’s nothing that isn’t bleeding raw except the metal left arm, spasming against the weak and useless meat. They tear the broken skin as it heals, his liver torn out over and over for sins he can’t remember.  
  
When the gun is assembled, and disassembled, and reassembled, and disassembled, he’s cut down. Gasping naked on the floor is the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to him, until there’s the pain and pressure of the right arm being pulled back into its socket, not dead enough after all. He lies there willing his heart to stop, right side pounding and left side dead already. If the rest of him were dead as the metal arm, he wouldn’t have to feel anything at all, just die inside himself as cold metal instead of hot, weak meat.  
  
Except that the metal arm isn’t dead enough to not want oatmeal, a dish of it dropped on the floor just out of reach. The metal arm reaches for it, and the pain of a steel tipped boot driven into the ribs under it tells him the metal in him goes down at least that far, hot agony cutting through all the other throbbing aches.  
  
Noise. Another kick in the ribs, more noise when the metal arm pulls his carcass towards the oatmeal and it’s kicked out of reach. He can smell it, practically feel the warmth of it even where it spatters across the floor to mix with blood and the other excrement his body has made on its way to dying. He’d eat it anyway, even now, even with cracked lips rubbed raw on the dirty concrete, even wondering if he can move fast enough to gouge metal fingers into his own veins once he has the strength to do it.  
  
More noise. Words, this time, coalescing out of the noise like blood clots. The oatmeal is nudged back at him with booted toes and dirty words. Push ups, he catches, but doesn’t know from where. It’s just there in the staticky pain, like the arm, like his life.  
  
The metal arm steadies under him first, and it’s the only part of him that’s not shaking when he gets the dead right arm under him. The first one is agonizingly slow, and so is the second, and so is the third. He doesn’t get to the fourth, because the oatmeal is kicked against the wall and he lunges at the closest shadow, metal arm finding the strength to drag it down to his level and throttle it even with the mitten on.  
  
The dark is a relief after that, buried alone in a stone box to die. The metal arm, though, finds the spattered oatmeal by memory, the only part of him with any will left. It drags the rest of the raw carcass along with it, mitten tugged off in the dark to scrape cold, bloody oatmeal off the wall and suck off of his metal fingers.   
  
The dead right arm drags him down so he can only sit listing against the wall, pushing himself like a mangled dog looking for spattered oatmeal as he cradles the right arm in his left. It jerks at random, reacting to pain he can only feel after it’s happened, shooting up from the finger tips.   
  
He digs the steady fingers of his left hand into the dead meat of the right, willing it to finish dying like the rest of him.


End file.
